Beijing invites foreign buyers into old courtyard homes

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This week a young estate agent from Mao Zedong's home town was showing potential foreign buyers and renters around the splendid courtyard homes of old Beijing.

The houses were seized from the rich and privileged by the late chairman's communist revolutionaries more than half a century ago.

"We are getting a lot of interest now from Europeans especially - French people, Germans, Italians," said Sherry Zhu, driving a foreign client down to fashionable Houhai, a district of willow-lined small lakes tucked behind the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace. "They want to be closer to Chinese tradition."

Renting a siheyuan, or courtyard house, has long been the preferred living arrangement for those foreign residents besotted with things Chinese, rather than the high-rise modern apartments or American-style "villa" estates favoured by most expats.

The limited supply of traditional housing after the city's frenetic reconstruction - especially in the precincts around the Forbidden City - means the search is often difficult. Rents have soared: Ms Zhu showed off one reconstructed lakeside house, with air-conditioning and all mod cons, that rents for $US8500 ($12,140) a month.

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This month, the Beijing city government took another big step in rolling back the revolution. It announced siheyuan could be sold to foreigners at lower tax rates, to be restored as residences or converted to offices as long as the traditional external appearance is maintained.

A market is quickly emerging. Numerous courtyard houses are advertised on the internet, ranging in price from about 20 million yuan ($3.4 million) for a large compound directly facing one of the scenic lakes, to between 3 million and 5 million yuan for smaller premises in the laneways around the old Lama Temple a little to the north. This will generally buy a building of dark-grey brick - or several separate buildings - set around a courtyard, capped with steep-pitched roofs of grey cobble tiles, with woodwork and window frames painted vermilion and eaves in red, green and gold.

There is a single entrance to the yard, usually on the south side, through a double doorway often guarded by stone lions, with a baffle-wall to prevent passers-by snooping. The courtyard is a sun trap during the freezing Beijing winters, and shaded by fruit trees in summer. Birdcages, tubs of goldfish and glazed flowerpots are part of this private world.

The downsides are often damp walls and infestations of rats and other vermin.

There has not been a big influx of foreigners into Beijing's courtyards since the 1930s, when residents such as Harold Acton, the Anglo-Italian writer who was the model for Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, fashioned splendid homes for themselves and got about in silk mandarin-style gowns.

Would-be foreign buyers face several problematic areas. The Beijing municipal land office is cagey about which properties are for sale. The buyer has to tell the office what size of property is sought, the purpose, and the budget. Then officials promise to find a property that best fits the specifications. The deal has to be submitted to the Beijing Security Investigation Office for Foreign Projects to see if it would create any national security risk or be inappropriately located (for instance, next to a senior military official or a prominent non-person like Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary purged during the Tiananmen affair in 1989 and still a prisoner in his courtyard home off Wangfujing, Beijing's most upmarket shopping area).

Then there is the ownership title of the person trying to sell the property. Many courtyard houses have already passed from state ownership to private companies in deals that may not be fully transparent. The sale confers a 70-year lease on the land, which can be renewed, but the conditions of use still seem vague.

As one estate agent showed a potential foreign developer around one courtyard this week, tenants from about 20 families gathered in an agitated crowd. "Don't worry about the residents," Jia Wenzhe said. "The company will deal with them."